Stieg Larsson - The Girl who played with Fire

She could not find anything of note. Bjurman seemed to be behaving in accordance with her instructions. She bit her lower lip. She still had a feeling that something was not right.

She got up from the chair and was about to turn off the desk lamp when she stopped. She took out the binders and looked through them again. She was perplexed. The binders should have contained more. A year ago there had been a summary of her development since childhood from the Guardianship Agency. That was missing. Why would Bjurman remove papers from an active case? She frowned. She could not think of any good reason. Unless he was filing additional documentation somewhere else. Her eyes swept across the shelves of the rolltop cabinet and the bottom desk drawer.

She did not have a picklock with her, so she padded back to Bjurman’s bedroom and fished his key ring out of his suit jacket, which was hanging over a wooden valet stand. The same objects were in the drawer as a year ago. But the collection had been supplemented with a flat box whose printed illustration showed a Colt.45 Magnum.

She thought through the research that she had done about Bjurman two years ago. He liked to shoot and was a member of a shooting club. According to the public weapons registry he had a licence for a Colt.45 Magnum.

Reluctantly she came to the conclusion that it was no surprise he kept the drawer locked.

She did not like the situation, but she could not think of any immediate pretext for waking him and scaring the shit out of him.

Johansson woke at 6:30 a.m. She heard the morning TV on low volume from the living room and smelled freshly brewed coffee. She also heard the clacking of keys from Svensson’s iBook. She smiled.

She had never seen him work so hard on a story before. Millennium had been a good move. He was often afflicted with writer’s block, and it seemed as though hanging out with Blomkvist and Berger and the others was having a beneficial effect on him. He would come home gloomy after Blomkvist had pointed out shortcomings or shot down some of his reasoning, but then he’d work twice as hard.

She wondered whether it was the right moment to interrupt his concentration. Her period was three weeks late. She had not yet taken a pregnancy test. Perhaps it was time.

She would soon turn thirty. In less than a month she had to defend her dissertation. Dr. Johansson. She smiled again and decided not to say anything to Svensson before she was sure. Maybe she would wait until he was finished with his book and she was giving a party after she got her doctorate.

She dozed for ten more minutes before she got up and went into the living room with a sheet wrapped around her. He looked up.

“It’s not 7:00 yet,” she said.

“Blomkvist is acting superior again.”

“Has he been mean to you? Serves you right. You like him, don’t you?”

Svensson leaned back in the living-room sofa and met her eyes. After a moment he nodded.

“Millennium is a great place to work. I talked to Mikael at Kvarnen before you picked me up last night. He was wondering what I was going to be doing after this project was finished.”

“Aha. And what did you say?”

“That I didn’t know. I’ve hung around as a freelancer for so many years now. I’d be glad of something more steady.”

“Millennium.”

He nodded.

“Mikael has tested the waters, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in a part-time job. Same contract as Henry Cortez and Lotta Karim are on. I’d get a desk and a retainer from Millennium and could take in the rest on the side.”

“Do you want to do that?”

“If they come up with a concrete offer, I’ll say yes.”

“OK, but it’s not 7:00 yet and it’s Saturday.”

“I know. I just thought I’d polish it up a bit here and there.”

“I think you should come back to bed and polish something else.”

She smiled at him and turned up a corner of the sheet. He put the computer on standby.

Salander spent a good deal of time over the next few days doing research on her PowerBook. Her search extended in many different directions, and she was not always sure what she was looking for.

Some of the fact collecting was simple. From the Media Archive she put together a history of Svavelsjö MC. The club appeared in newspaper stories going by the name Tälje Hog Riders. Police had raided the clubhouse, at that time located in an abandoned schoolhouse outside Södertälje, when neighbours reported shots fired. The police turned up in astonishing force and broke up a beer-drenched party that had degenerated into a shooting contest with an AK-4, which later turned out to have been stolen from the disbanded I20 regiment in Västerbotten in the early 1980s.

According to one evening paper, Svavelsjö MC had six or seven members and a dozen hangers-on. All the full members had been in jail. Two stood out. The club leader was Carl-Magnus “Magge” Lundin, who was pictured in Aftonbladet when the police raided the premises in 2001. He had been convicted on five charges of theft, receiving stolen goods, and for drug offences in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of the sentences – for a crime which involved grievous bodily harm – put him away for eighteen months. He was released in 1995 and soon afterwards became president of Tälje Hog Riders, now Svavelsjö MC.

According to the police gang unit, the club’s number two was Sonny Nieminen, now thirty-seven years old, who had run up no fewer than twenty-three convictions. He had started his career at the age of sixteen when he was put on probation and in institutional care for assault and battery and theft. Over the next ten years he was convicted on five counts of theft, one of aggravated theft, two of unlawful intimidation, two narcotics offences, extortion, assault on a civil servant, two counts of possessing an illegal weapon, one criminal weapons charge, driving under the influence, and six counts of assault. He had been sentenced according to a scale that was incomprehensible to Salander: probation, fines, and repeated stints of thirty to sixty days in jail, until 1989 when he was put away for ten months for aggravated assault and robbery. He was out a few months later and kept his nose clean until October 1990. Then he got into a fight in a bar in Södertälje and ended up with a conviction for manslaughter and a six-year prison sentence. He was out by 1995.

In 1996 he was arrested as an accessory to an armed robbery. He had provided three of the robbers with weapons. He was sentenced to four years and released in 1999. According to a newspaper article from 2001 in which Nieminen was not named – but where the details of the suspect were such that he was effectively identified – he looked more than likely to have played his part in the murder of a member of a rival gang.

Salander downloaded the mug shots of Nieminen and Lundin. Nieminen had a photogenic face with dark curly hair and dangerous eyes. Lundin just looked like a complete idiot, and was without doubt the man who had met the giant at Blomberg’s Café. Nieminen was the man waiting in McDonald’s.

Via the national vehicle register she traced the white Volvo to the car rental firm Auto-Expert in Eskilstuna. She dialled their number and spoke to a Refik Alba:

“My name is Gunilla Hansson. My dog was run over yesterday by someone who just drove off. The bastard was driving a car from your firm – I could tell from the licence plate. A white Volvo.” She gave the number.

“I’m so sorry.”

“That’s not enough, I’m afraid. I want the name of the driver so that I can sue him.”

“Have you reported the matter to the police?”

“No, I’d like to settle it directly.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t give out the names of our clients unless a police report has been filed.”